If you missed the extraordinary campaign ad for Republican presidential frontrunner Herman Cain because you’ve been too busy with other things, please enjoy this modified version of the spot, which contains only the best parts of the original work. It is truly a remarkable age, and astounding country, in which we live.

“Teenagers who drink lots of soft drinks get into more fights and carry more weapons than their peers who drink less, found a new study. And while the study couldn’t determine whether soft drinks actually cause violence, the findings add to a growing — yet still controversial — body of research on the effects of nutrition on behavior.” Older readers might not want to click through, as the article goes on to reference “a notorious 1979 San Francisco murder trial, lawyers blamed the killer’s actions on his recent switch from a health-food diet to one filled with Coca-Cola and other junk food,” which… really? It is incredibly painful to see events that occurred in one’s lifetime suddenly become the stuff of oblique history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEHKEc7sudE

“The word ‘nautilus’ comes from the Greek for boat. When the first shells arrived in Renaissance Europe, collectors were stunned: They saw the perfect spirals as reflecting the larger order of the universe. Later on, Victorian homes displayed them as curios. In his famous 1858 poem ‘The Chambered Nautilus,’ Oliver Wendell Holmes admired ‘the silent toil’ that produced the ‘lustrous coil.’ And in ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ Jules Verne created a watertight submarine of many compartments and christened it the Nautilus.”
 — While we marvel today at how stupid we are for ridding the world of its most amazing species because we like to wear their bodies as jewelry (or, as the case may be, to grind them up into powders and pills we take to achieve erections), it presents a good opportunity to also think about the fusion jazz keyboardist Bob James. His spirally, universe-reflecting “Nautilus” is one of the most frequently sampled tracks in rap music history. (James credits CTI records founder Creed Taylor for coming up with the title, because of the tones that sound like a submarine.) Here are fifteen excellent songs made from “Nautilus” that don’t threaten anything with extinction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzxsSSd_ops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBk_jZX_TpQ

And here’s a video of a chambered nautilus swimming in the ocean. It is super-cool.

Are common houseflies picking up drug-resistant bacteria from the feces of the pigs we shoot full of antibiotics to get them to market faster and then crapping and vomiting out these superbugs onto the surfaces of our supposedly sterile homes? Yeah, probably.

Okay, sure, this clip was actually put together by the Lancashire Police, but give it another ten years or so and it’s going to look like a goddamn documentary. Except there will be more knifings. [Note: If you’re watching at work, be sure to turn the sound down.]

Happy 60th birthday to Mr. Richard Lloyd, guitarist for one of the greatest bands ever.

“According to a new study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, it would appear that lonely people tend to shop differently than their peers who are in stable relationships, or married. The research is part of a larger investigation on social networks. The paper also revealed that more people report feeling alone and socially isolated today than they did decades ago. Researchers did not expect to find this result, since people are now interconnected online to a degree never-before though possible. Still, the research showed that as many as 1 in 4 people living in the United States report feeling lonely, and having no one to discuss important matters with. Apparently, this feeling is also influencing these individuals’ shopping patterns…. The new findings could be of great use for advertisers. Companies will from now on be able to conduct specific campaigns targeted at this previously-untapped segment of the general population.”

Photo by wrangler, via Shutterstock

“Many of us sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, and then go home and head for the couch to surf the Web or watch television, exchanging one seat and screen for another. Even if we try to squeeze in an hour at the gym, is it enough to counteract all that motionless sitting? A mounting body of evidence suggests not.”

“This urge to define generations is also about a yearning for a collective memory in an increasingly atomized world, at least where my generation is concerned. Indeed, where the Millennials tend to define themselves in terms of the way they live now, people in my cohort find fellowship more in what happened in the past, clinging to cultural totems as though our shared experiences will somehow lead us to better figure out who we are. The Internet is littered with quick-hit nostalgia websites like I’m Remembering, which posts pictures of toys and TV characters and old photos from the ’80s and ’90s. Certainly, discovering that someone else also had a Cabbage Patch Kid does immediately create a sense of shared history, no matter how superficial. This aligns us more with Gen X, which has also always bonded through nostalgia. Millennials, on the other hand, seem to be always looking forward, imbued with a sense of optimism and hope that to us reads as naive.”
 — Do you straddle the line between Generation X and Millennial? Then you are a member of Generation Catalano, according to some lady in her early thirties on Slate.

Photo by JASON ANFINSEN, via Flickr

The New Parents’ Guide To Car Shopping

Jon Methven is the author of This Is Your Captain Speaking, due out in 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He can be reached here, or follow him on Twitter @jonmethven.